We still don't know if Senator Tim Johnson will vote to filibuster Judge Alito, but he's keeping that option open. ABC News reported that "Democratic Sen. Tim Johnson of South Dakota refused to rule out supporting a filibuster." The Alito battle will begin after Christmas, so you'd think reporters would examine what Johnson might do. Also, Powerline is discussing a new study indicating how much the media favors liberal judicial candidates compared to conservatives like Alito:
Rich Noyes of the Media Research Center compares the network news coverage of the Samuel Alito and Ruth Bader Ginsburg nominations. His overall finding is what you would expect -- outrageous liberal bias. When Alito was nominated, ABC, CNN, and CBS raced to see how many times they could squeeze the word conservative into their stories (NBC was less insistent). When Ginsburg was nominated the MSM networks uniformly pronounced her a moderate.
The contrast in the reporting (if you can call it that) with respect to the issue of abortion is particularly noteworthy. The networks greeted Alito's nomination with much hand-wringing about whether replacing a pro-abortion Justice with a conservative would change the direction of the Court on this issue. Twelve years ago, however, the networks gave no voice to the concerns of conservatives that replacing Byron White with Ginsburg would change the direcion of the Court with respect to such abortion-related issues such as parental consent and government funding. Then, as now, only the concerns of the pro-abortion activists were raised. Indeed, CBS' Paula Zahn pointed out that The National Abortion Rights Action League "is not totally comfortable with this nomination of Judge Ginsburg." At NBC, Katie Couric voiced similar fears.
Thus, at least when it comes to judicial nominations, these major news outlets are simply the mouthpieces of liberal interest groups.
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